Emerging from Narcissistic Parental Shadows

We will discuss patients who have developed as extensions of their narcissistic parents. They’ve provided self-regulatory functions for their parent(s) and felt cared for and protected in return, but at the expense of evolving their independent authenticity. While these patients vitally need to emerge as their independent selves, this very emergence threatens this fundamental tie to the parent and their basic sense of self.

Whatever the catalyzing circumstances, these patients come to a crisis point in which they feel they must differentiate from their narcissistic parents, yet also dread this. We will outline the conflicted process through which we enable these patients to emerge from the shadows of their parents’ narcissism. Several illustrative cases will be presented, and audience members will be encouraged to present relevant work.

Jenny Kahn Kaufmann, Ph.D. is Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. She’s also Faculty of IPPP and IPPP on-line. She’s supervised Psychiatric Residents at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital for close to 20 years. Her focus on loss and its impact on the development of the self is reflected in her teaching and writing.

Peter Kaufmann, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor at IPSS and NIP and co-director of IPSS. Teaching such courses as “The Evolution of Psychoanalysis,” he has a particular interest in comparative psychoanalysis and in efforts to integrate the clinical approaches and sensibilities represented by different theoretical perspectives. His papers on “Working with Men Who Please Too Much”, “On Transforming the Reparative Quest” and “When Empathy Opens” reflect this comparative and integrative interest.